Hello,

We use QBES 19 Desktop and we sell commercial food-service equipment.  We have a warehouse, so we have some equipment ship here and we consolidate it and deliver it to our customer when they're ready for it on-site.  However, we also have quite a bit of equipment drop-ship, third-party from our suppliers to our customer's locations.  There are many items that we sell which are technically kits - for example a rolling rack, sold to our customer with a model number we create based on the dimensions of the rack, but the rack actually consists of multiple true inventory items (shelving).  So, we JUST started to use inventory assembly items/assembly builds and I'm not sure if using them will work for us because many of the assembly items are kits that are ordered and drop-shipped from our suppliers - so we are sometimes not assembling them; instead the customer is assembling them.  So my questions are:

1. Should we even use assembly items if they are often not assembled here?

2. If the customer wants to see an annual report showing how many rolling racks they bought in 2019, NOT how many 24x48 shelves and posts (the items that make up the rolling rack), we can't use groups, I assume.

3. Would we have to essentially double our inventory by creating identical NON-inventory parts for the items we have drop-ship?  Even though we sell all equipment both ways - bring into inventory and later deliver and invoice, as well as drop-ship.

4. We use sales orders when we enter an order in QB, and usually PO's are created from the sales order.  If we put an assembly item on a sales order, I assume we would need to manually create a PO for the items needed to complete the assembly build.  Then we would wait for the PO to be received, then "build" the assembly?  Is that the correct process? And how should that be handled if this is a drop-ship order from the manufacturer to the customer?

Thank you!